Ratings7
Average rating3.6
*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE* *ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021* Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award "Astonishingly good." —Lily Meyer, NPR "So incantatory and visceral I don’t think I’ll ever forget it." —Ali Smith, The Guardian | Best Books of 2020 One of The Wall Street Journal's 11 best books of the fall | One of The A.V. Club's fifteen best books of 2020 |A Sunday Times best book of the year Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War. Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.
Reviews with the most likes.
Det er all grunn til å lese denne boken og til å tro på alt skrytet denne internasjonale booker-prisvinneren har fått. Poetisk krigslitteratur suggererende brutalt ble nesten for mye, men så skjer det noe rundt side 70 som du bare må lese.
Trigger warning: fuckin' everything. As in, if you're the kind of person who needs trigger warnings, this is not a book for you. Even if you aren't, you may want to be in a mental safe space before reading this: it's pretty devastating.
The violence of the war is bad enough, but what really got to me was the emotional violence that the protagonist endures: unimaginable loneliness, guilt, compounded with tragic losses... and absolutely no way to communicate. He internalizes it all, to the point of inventing complete conversations and relationships with the people around him, ending up lost in a world of his own imagining. The book is narrated first person, so all we have is his perspective, and the author handles the sanity death spiral masterfully.
Edition note: the narrator's language is quite lovely, a syncopated voice that I think would be especially effective in audiobook.